Alas, Audrey Hepburn was just 63 when she died. But the life she lived was fascinating, even inspirational, as revealed in Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn. Though veteran celebrity biographer Donald Spoto has largely relied on previously published materials, it’s the way he uses the information infusing it with passion for and knowledge of his subject that makes this book such a pleasure.

Belgian-born, raised in Holland under Nazi occupation, Hepburn grew up longing to become a ballerina. She instead became a London chorus girl, appeared in print ads for soap and shampoo, and got small film roles. By chance, she was spotted by the writer Colette who deemed her perfect for the lead role in the stage version of Gigi, about a Parisian girl raised to be a courtesan. And so the unknown 22-year-old became a Broadway star and won a Tony. She next starred opposite Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, winning an Oscar. In the era of va-va-voom stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, the reed-thin, flat-chested Hepburn was decidedly unique. She also had an allure that captivated Givenchy who would go on to design the fabulous clothes that made her a style icon. But if she was the queen of chic in films such as Funny Face and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, beneath the poised demeanor was an inner sadness. Hepburn battled lifelong depression. There were numerous (discreet) affairs, some of them with co-stars, and two unsuccessful marriages. But, she found joy in motherhood, and as a former child of war, she empathized with the suffering children on whose behalf she tirelessly worked, through UNICEF.

Los Angeles-based writer Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of biographies of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

<b>Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin</b> But, age before beauty: Mae West, known for her body language (a knowing tilt of the head, a carefully raised eyebrow) as well as her suggestive wisecracks, is studiously depicted in <b>Mae West: It Ain’t No Sin</b>. Simon Louvish, biographer of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, had access to West’s archives, a treasure trove consisting of 2,000 pages of West-penned jokes and gags, as well as various drafts of plays, screenplays and treatments. All this written by the woman who famously uttered, Come up and see me sometime. The former Mary Jane West worked her way up in vaudeville, then became a Broadway legend in part due to the notoriety of the 1926 play, Sex. West wrote and starred in the play, which was deemed immoral in a headline-making trial. Sentenced to prison for 10 days, West quipped to a reporter, Give my regards to Broadway. No wonder Hollywood beckoned.

Hard to believe, but she was 40 years old when she began making movies, and history, with her <i>umming</i> and <i>oohing</i> and sexual insinuations. She drove the censors nuts, delighted audiences and became the highest-paid performer in the country. Her screen reign lasted just seven years, but she went on to wow audiences in Vegas, and to star in several ’70s-era cult pics, including the campy <i>Myra Breckinridge</i>. When she died at 87 she was living with a much-younger former body-builder, giving credence to her line, a hard man is good to find. <i>Los Angeles-based writer Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of biographies of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.</i>

He was a perfectionist who lived for his work which would profoundly permeate all our lives. The man who turned animation into an art form, and amusement parks into family-friendly theme parks, also impacted our collective psyche. Do you believe dreams can come true? Ever wish upon a star? You have Walt Disney to thank, says cultural historian Neal Gabler in his heavily researched and, at 800-plus pages, just plain heavy, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

Over the years there have been myriad Disney tomes, some of them pretty harsh toward Uncle Walt (Marc Eliot’s Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince) and toward his cultural legacy (Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney). It didn’t help that the Disney empire has long guarded its vaults and has a thuggish reputation among the press. Now lowering the drawbridge, they coughed up the keys to the kingdom for Gabler, who enjoyed complete access to the Disney Archives.

The resulting work, seven years in the making, is a revelatory portrait of a visionary who would create one of the world’s most powerful business enterprises. Though, as Gabler ably illustrates, Disney never set out to get rich. To him, money was a means to further his next venture, and the next. To pursue his then-ground-breaking efforts (the endless list includes Snow White and Fantasia), Disney was forever juggling finances. It was only with Disneyland, and the park’s synergistic ties to TV (which also enshrined the movies and merchandising) that he became wealthy.

From a hard times childhood, that nonetheless left him with idyllic, lasting memories he would recreate in his nostalgic live-action movies and at his park (especially via Main Street, U.S.

A.), to his adventures in animation (including the bumpy business side of movie-making), to the development of his studio and theme park kingdoms, Disney examines its subject with a balance of insight, awe and empathy.

“American Woman Weds Man She Shot” is an irresistible newspaper headline from 1932 about Alice de Janzé, the Chicago heiress who married second husband Raymund de Trafford after previously shooting him in a crime of passion. A member of the decadent Happy Valley crowd in Kenya, de Janzé lived a life of privilege and bad behavior. But was she capable of murder?

Paul Spicer’s The Temptress seeks to answer this question by reopening the case of Joss Hay, Lord Erroll, whose 1941 murder in Kenya has never been solved. Readers may remember Erroll as Lady Idina Sackville’s third husband from Frances Osborne’s The Bolter, the dramatic story of Sackville’s louche life in Happy Valley. While unhappy husbands, spurned mistresses and even Britain’s secret MI6 service are all potential candidates for Erroll’s murder, Spicer builds a case against the mentally unstable de Janzé, one of Erroll’s former lovers.

Spicer is uniquely situated to tell this story, as his mother had been a friend of de Janzé’s in Kenya in the 1920s. The book, however, works better as true-crime than it does as biography. Spicer’s case against de Janzé, while compelling, is hardly airtight: The narrative doesn’t tell us much about the actual relationship between de Janzé and Erroll, and Spicer relies too often on speculation. The second half of The Temptress is much more exciting than the first, as Spicer dives into the court records surrounding Erroll’s murder.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to get Alice de Janzé wrong: Any woman who travels to Paris from Kenya accompanied by a lion and a baboon offers a delectable subject for biography. Readers of The Bolter will happily snap this book up for more of the same scandalous behavior.

Lyndall Gordon’s new biography of Emily Dickinson’s family, Lives Like Loaded Guns, is a tour de force. Meticulously researched and keenly argued, it transforms the conventional image of Dickinson—and reveals how that image came to be.

More than 100 years of biography, fiction and theater have depicted the famous poet as a reclusive woman in white who fled the world, perhaps after a tragic love affair, to spend the rest of her life gardening and writing brilliant poems nobody saw. Gordon upends this legend, revealing Dickinson as a passionate and powerful woman who was fervent in her friendships (too fervent, in fact, for many of her friends), had a midlife love affair with an elderly judge and carefully controlled the circulation of her poems. In one of the book’s biggest bombshells, Gordon uses family history, pharmacy records, 19th-century medical treatises and Dickinson’s poems to argue that epilepsy, rather than thwarted love, was the reason she rarely left her home.

While the first half of the book tells the story of Dickinson’s life, the second half morphs into a literary thriller. The lengthy affair between Dickinson’s brother Austin and Mabel Loomis Todd has been well-known since the publication of their letters in 1984, but Gordon meticulously traces its aftermath, as Dickinson’s and Todd’s heirs battled for control over the poet’s manuscripts, publication and reputation. Todd, whom Gordon calls the “Lady Macbeth of Amherst,” is the villain of this part of the story, creating the “shy . . . eccentric, asexual” Dickinson of myth, and erasing from the historical record Dickinson’s strong bond with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Austin’s wife and Todd’s rival. But Gordon remains scrupulously even-handed, acknowledging Todd’s insights into Dickinson’s genius and her heroic editorial work on the first editions of Dickinson’s poems and letters.

Few books are perfect: Gordon’s use of Dickinson’s poetry as biographical evidence is sometimes dubious, and her own prose, though often delightfully personable, can be overwrought. Still, those are minor flaws in a brilliant and breathtaking book.

An icon because she broke through racial barriers, Hattie McDaniel is known the world over for her performance as the feisty Mammy in Gone With the Wind. Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood examines her 45-year career, during which McDaniel was often at odds with other African Americans because she took roles that some considered derogatory. The fact is, McDaniel made her mark at a time when racism permeated popular culture. Author Jill Watts, a history professor, never lets us forget this. The sledgehammer approach isn’t necessary; McDaniel’s fascinating story and struggle abounds in ironies.

Consider: though her father fought for the Union (with the Tennessee 12th U.S. Colored Infantry), as a minstrel show performer (influenced by the great Bert Williams), McDaniel parodied a Mammy character. She was 38 and had been twice married when she made her way to Southern California. Settling in South Central L.A., she worked as a film extra for $7.50 a day. It was 1931 and Hollywood’s most popular black performer was the shuffling Stepin Fetchit. A career turning point came with an 11-day job on a Will Rogers film. By 1937, McDaniel was making more than a dozen films annually. Still, she was relegated to the roles of maids/companions. But the avid follower of positive thinker Norman Vincent Peale hunkered on.

With its romanticized depiction of the Old South, Gone With the Wind created firestorms long before it came to the screen. While the NAACP was fuming, McDaniel bought and read the book and campaigned for the part of Mammy. She wound up infusing the character with gutsy bossiness as well as devotion. She wasn’t invited to the Atlanta premiere, but scored a coup by winning an Oscar as best supporting actress. Alas, what followed were offers to again portray maids, as well as a prolonged political battle with members of the Screen Actors Guild and the NAACP. As McDaniel would later surmise, there’s only 18 inches between a pat on the back and a kick in the seat of the pants. When not writing about movies, Los Angeles-based journalist Pat H. Broeske likes to watch them.